Odessa On The Verge

Odessa is a little girl who lives in my imagination. Sometimes I think of sentences that involve her. Sentences like, "Odessa was delicate, even for an eight year old. She was small of frame with large, dark eyes, like her mother. She came to live with Ninny when she was only two, after her mother died. When she was five, Ninny gave her a box made of gold paper, shaped like a star. Odessa took the box into her little room and put the only photograph she had of her mother into the box and placed the lid on it, and there it has stayed, quiet and safe, ever since. Now, Odessa collects boxes."

And that's where it stops. I don't really know why Odessa collects boxes, but I know that she lives in Kentucky, has an older brother with leukemia, has a father that's in jail for killing their mother, and that someone eventually needs to ask him (the father) if he will be tested as a possible bone marrow donor for her brother. But like I said before, I just get a couple of sentences every now and then. Like right after I've taken a shower and I'm sitting on the edge of the tub with my towels wrapped around me. Which is not a very convenient time to whip out the keyboard and start writing them down. So the sentences go away, and revisit me again at other times, when I am bored or lonely or reading the label on the side of a cereal box while chewing. I have had her in my head for so long now that Odessa is a friend. I think maybe I'd like to keep her in my head.

This is the part where I think about not answering my phone for awhile. Where I wonder if maybe I am on the edge of a not-quite-mid-life crisis. Where I think about how I would like to live in a loft downtown and everyone in my life, without a single exception, tells me that it is a stupid idea, that it is unnecessarily dangerous, and that my car insurance premium will skyrocket. I feel like telling them all to take a flying leap off a tall building. Except that if they did, I would be an orphan, without any family or friends. And then it wouldn't matter where I lived, because life would be miserable no matter what.

But I digress.

I am restless, which is the root of all of this. I have a job that I despise, but that I hope I will be able to suffer through just long enough to get graduate school paid for, so that I can then get a job that I actually like. (Nikki sent me info about an organization that builds libraries in Central and South America. I'd like to do that.) I still think about joining the Peace Corps too. But then my feminine biology kicks in, and so does the math. 25 + 3 years of graduate school + 1 additional year at work to fulfill my commitment to them for paying for graduate school + 2 years, 4 months of the Peace Corps = 31. Then I still have to find my dream job, get married, make a baby (or two), buy a house (not necessarily in that order), which I figure puts me at about 50. At which point I have the mid life crisis that's been pre-empted by whatever the hell it is I'm going through now.

I get so exhausted thinking about all of that -- not to mention the daily dose of stress I give myself from thinking about how the hell our stupid government is going to fix the Iraq mess, hopefully before my kid brother gets sent there; not to mention finding a way to provide affordable, accessible, health care for all Americans, oh, and fixing global warming -- that I think I'd just rather sit in my towels on the side of my tub and think up some more sentences about my little friend Odessa.

Did I mention she collects boxes?